Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/159

 Boldness and Timidity 57i wrote somewhere the other day of the " whitey-brown " style of American college professors. Such a charge is not directed against too great linguistic daring. A lack of pith, of raciness, an insecure hold on idiom in some of its more slippery turns might very properly be remarked in not a little American writing ; in short, an anxiety to play safe in a dangerous game. There is nothing unnatural in an association of boldness and timidity. Both, however, represent excess. The discovery of the mean is 'the problem, and that will move toward a solu- tion as the standards which express it are more zealously and intelligently sought within the history and present practice of American English itself.